Saturday, April 07, 2012

Jonah Goldberg is stupid. Really stupid. Can't tie his shoes stupid. Top commenter at a newspaper website stupid. After decades of scientific research, Thers wrote a song describing the thought patterns of the Goldberg brain.

Much of what he writes takes the form of "Yeah, but liberals are the REAL [racists, warmongers, authoritarians, liars, misogynists, homophobes, etc]." The culmination of this particular intellectual journey was the publication of his book LIBERAL FASCISM, which amazingly is only the second best book titled LIBERAL FASCISM ever published. The first best book titled LIBERAL FASCISM was written by The Editors. The subtitle of Goldberg's book evolved over time, over its long journey from conception to publication, from "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton" to "The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods" and then, finally, to "The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." But whatever. Amusingly, he took this little project quite seriously, not seeing it as the bit of agitprop his editors presumably did, thinking he crafted "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" that liberals are the real fascists, so neener neener suck on that libtards! Such care that it took him a really...long....time... to make it. And then he put a smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover.

Even Jonah once knew the Hitler comparisons were generally off base, though I guess it's comparing conservatives to Hitler that was the real problem, because libtards are like Hitler stupid libtards! It's one thing - a very stupid thing, but a thing - to call us fascists, another to say we're Hitler. Except he didn't actually say that so stop saying that stupid libtard!

The editor of this intellectual tour de force was, of course, Adam Bellow, longtime shepherd of conservative crap molded into book form, son of someone with actual talent, and writer of the book In Praise of Nepotism. Really.

Way back in the early days of the "OH NO THE INTERNETS ARE RUINING JOURNALISM" era I used to marvel at the ability of journalists to ignore what was happening in their own world, to ignore the promotion of the very stupidest among them. I didn't make Jonah Goldberg the public face of punditry, they did. How did that work out?